The best kittens, technology, and video games blog in the world.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

magic/help update

I'm Cute! by Cracker Bunny from flickr (CC-NC-ND) It's been a long time since the revolution in Ruby documentation that magic/help was. And today there's a big new release. magic/help uses many interesting heuristics to look for documentation. Often it is able to find the right documentation when plain ri wouldn't. Unfortunately there seem to be a major mismatch between the reality and Ruby documentation. One good example are SomeClass.new methods. They are all documented, but none of them exists ! In reality there's only Class.new, that calls SomeClass.initialize. So magic/help "correctly" returned documentation for Class.new when asked about SomeClass.new. That was the worst case, but there are many more. In new release magic/help is much smarter. It is now able to handle many quirks it previously couldn't. It is tested against full documentation database - and it doesn't make even a single mistake now. magic/help now comes in tarball, zip, and gem formats. So just grab it, install the gem, and add the following to your ~/.irbrc:

require 'rubygems'
require 'magic_help'

No comments: